Clive Lewis - Collected Letters Volume Three - Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

2Pitter gave a lecture entitled ‘A Return to Poetic Law’ to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 22 February 1952. A copy can be found in the Pitter Papers, Temporary Box, Bodleian Library.

3Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress , First Part, pp. 73-4: ‘I thought again, this Shame tells me what men are; but it tells me nothing what God or the Word of God is. And I thought moreover, That at the day of doom, we shall not be doomed to death or life according to the hectoring spirits of the world, but according to the Wisdom and Law of the Highest. Therefore thought I, what God says, is best, though all the men in the world are against it…But indeed this Shame was a bold villain; I could scarce shake him out of my company; yea, he would be haunting of me, and continually whispering me in the ear, with some one or other of the infirmities that attend Religion; but at last I told him, Twas but in vain to attempt further in this business; for those things that he disdained, in those did I see most glory; And so at last I got past this importunate one.’

4Since 1930 the Pitter family had owned a cottage in Felsted, Essex, where Ruth taught herself viticulture. The cottage, however, had to be left behind when Ruth and her companion of many years, Kathleen O’Hara, decided to buy a house in the village of Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire. ‘The Hawthorns’ in Chilton Road was set in several acres of garden and orchard, and was within reach of Oxford and London. They moved in shortly before Christmas 1953. Pitter noted: ‘In coming to the neighbourhood of Oxford, of course I had hoped to see a little more of Lewis, of David Cecil, and others, and to attend open lectures, plays, etc. But we could not find anything near enough to make this at all easy’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 113).

5Dorsett, And God Came In , ch. 3, pp. 90-1.

6ibid., p. 91.

7This is a reply to a letter from Don Giovanni of 9 January 1953 (?), which appears in Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria , pp. 76-7.

8There had been a mistake. The article, ‘Responsabilité’–which was not by Don Giovanni Calabria but by Padre Paolo Manna—was published in L’Amico , 8 (Sep.-Oct. 1952), pp. 122-4. The article is reproduced in Una Gioia Insolita , pp. 283-5.

9Lewis had only recently begun writing the book on prayer mentioned here. He mentioned it to Don Giovanni again in a letter of 17 March 1953, but had abandoned it by the following year (see the letter to Sister Penelope of 15 February 1954). He could not think how to go on with the book until, in the spring of 1963, he found the form for what he wanted to say. The result was Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Bles, 1964; Fount, 1998).

101 Chronicles 13:9-10: ‘And when they came unto the threshingfloor of Chidon, Uzza put forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the ark: and there he died before God.’

11Luke 9:62: ‘And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’

12In ‘Responsabilità’ Fr Manna pleads for greater recognition of the gravity of Communist persecution of Christians (hospital workers as well as missionaries) in China. He argues that if a Communist (e.g., French Communist Party leader Jacques Duelos) is arrested in the West, the Communists rise in protest. There should be no less an outcry on behalf of victimized missionaries.

13‘so far as’; ‘whenever’.

14i.e., Paolo Manna.

15Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ , Bk. I, ch. 5.

16i.e., the book on prayer.

17Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:35.

18Luke 22:42.

19Lewis read a paper on this same problem to the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1953. It was published as ‘Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer’ in Christian Reflections , ed. Walter Hooper (London: Bles, 1967; Fount, 1998).

20Eustace and Edmund are characters in the Narnian stories; Jane and Mark Studdock are the married couple in That Hideous Strength .

21Lewis probably had in mind the last two lines of the title poem of Edna St Vincent Millay’s Renascence, and Other Poems (1925): ‘Ah, awful weight! Infinity/Pressed down upon the finite Me!’

22Rudolf Steiner.

23The Rev. Jones B. Shannon was executive director of the Church Society of College Work, Washington, DC.

24In February 1953 Joy became a member of the Episcopal Church and was confirmed in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York.

*This is the beginning of Act V, I suppose?

25T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946).

26Mrs Van Deusen, an Episcopalian, was in touch with the Order of the Holy Cross, a Benedictine Anglican monastic order in West Park, New York. The order had suggested she become one of the Associates of Holy Cross. These lay associates lived under a modified form of the Benedictine rule suitable to laymen.

27James was probably a clergyman Mrs Van Deusen knew.

28Warnie served for a number of years on the vestry of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Vestrymen help the churchwardens deal with the temporal affairs of a parish church.

29George Bernard Shaw.

30Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1901), ch. 1, ‘Virginibus Puerisque’: ‘Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.’

31In Charles Williams’s Region of the Summer Stars , ‘P’o-l’u’ is in the Antipodean Ocean. Starr was spending the academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. He was then offered a professorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he stayed until his retirement.

32William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1623), I, ii, 250-93. Ariel, a spirit of the air, was once the servant of Sycorax, a wicked sorceress who imprisoned him in a ‘cloven pine’ for refusing to fulfil her commands. He was trapped inside the tree for twelve years until Prospero arrived on the island, released him, and bound him to his service.

33Ray Bradbury, The Silver Locusts (1951).

34The forty-seven Ronin were Samurai retainers who in 1701 avenged their master’s death by killing his enemy, and then awaiting the death sentence to be passed on them by the government. The act of defying the government, and following instead the way of the Samurai to be faithful to their lord unto death, won them everlasting fame. Every year on 14 December people gather at their graves at Sengakuji Temple in Tokyo.

35Anthony Boucher was the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White (1911-68), critic and author. He wrote a column on mystery stories, ‘Criminal at Large’, for the New York Times , 1951-68, and was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , 1949-58. He is the author of many works of mystery and science fiction, and it was at his suggestion that Lewis contributed two short stories, ‘The Shoddy Lands’ and ‘Ministering Angels’-reprinted in The Dark Tower and Other Stories- to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction .

Boucher’s short story, ‘The Quest for St. Aquin’ was first published in New Tales of Space and Time, ed. Raymond J. Healy (New York: Holt, 1951), and ‘The Star Dummy’ was published in Fantastic (Fall 1952). They are reprinted in The Compleat Boucher: The Complete Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Anthony Boucher (1998).

*The porter at Holloway Jail told me it was ‘a ladies’ prison’